Human Flow isn’t about its creator, Ai Weiwei, but one of its key moments, occurring about a half an hour before its end, is pure Ai. On their tour of hotspots in our burgeoning global refugee crisis, the director and his crew stop at the U.S./Mexico border to capture footage and talk with locals living on the line of delineation separating the two countries. As the crew films, they are at one point interrupted by the arrival of an American yokel riding a four-wheeler. Whether he’s official or just some self-styled border patrolling vigilante is unclear, though his intent to intimidate the filmmakers is crystalline. Ai Weiwei, having spent the better part of the film’s two-hour running time demonstrating his unfailing grace alongside his bottomless compassion, scarcely reacts. He doesn’t even budge.

Preview photos show an eclectic range, from the talking Chewbacca mask (made famous by “Chewbacca mom”), a toy cash register, the keto diet book Ketotarian, Philips Hue bulbs and other smart home appliances (that work with Amazon Alexa, naturally). And, of course, Kindles, Echos, and other Amazon goods—which the firm notes have average reviews far above 4.0.

Those risks led GWW stock to essentially stall out starting in 2013. And they came home to roost last year. Disappointing earnings — particularly, falling margins — seemed to signal that pressure from Amazon was a real problem. By September, GWW traded at its lowest levels in almost six years. Grainger seemed destined to be another dominant business undone by a nimbler online competitor.
In December 2015, Amazon stated that "tens of millions" of people are Amazon Prime members.[27] Amazon Prime added 3 million members during the third week of December 2015.[28] It was also during December that Amazon announced the creation of the Streaming Partners Program,[29] an over-the-top subscription service that enables Amazon Prime subscribers to add additional streaming video services to their accounts. Among the programming providers involved in the program are Showtime, Starz (with additional content from sister network Encore), Lifetime Movie Club (containing recent original movie titles from Lifetime Television and Lifetime Movie Network), Smithsonian Earth, and Qello Concerts.
In July 2010, Amazon announced that e-book sales for its Kindle reader outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time ever during the second quarter of 2010. Amazon claims that, during that period, 143 e-books were sold for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no digital edition; and during late June and early July, sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcovers.[58]
One key finding of our research is that Prime membership is the principal support for Amazon’s apparel expansion, as Prime members show a much higher tendency than the average consumer to buy apparel on the site. As we show below, Prime membership has trended strongly upward in the recent past. The inference must be that further growth in Prime membership will, in the near term at least, be the foundation on which Amazon will build greater share in the apparel category.
Also in 2006, Amazon introduced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a virtual site farm,[93] allowing users to use the Amazon infrastructure to run applications ranging from running simulations to web hosting. In 2008, Amazon improved the service by adding Elastic Block Store (EBS), offering persistent storage for Amazon EC2 instances and Elastic IP addresses, and offering static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. Amazon introduced SimpleDB, a database system, allowing users of its other infrastructure to utilize a high-reliability, high-performance database system. In 2008, Amazon graduated EC2 from beta to "Generally Available" and added support for the Microsoft Windows platform.[94]

For handmade-craft platform Etsy (NASDAQ:ETSY), Amazon presented an existential threat. Etsy went public in April 2015 at $16: shares closed the first day at $30, up 88%. From there, the stock simply fell apart. By the time Amazon launched Amazon Handmade in October, ETSY traded below its IPO price; it would close 2015 just above $8. Investors wanted no part of a money-losing business facing Amazon’s unlimited resources.

Tablet Offer: Credits end at end of term, early termination, early payoff or upgrade, whichever occurs first. Taxes and svc charges excluded. No cash back. May not be combinable with other tablet offers. Requires activation at point of sale. Available to new and existing customers who have an active Sprint wireless phone line. Req. qualifying data plan and new activation. Only 1 Tablet Offer per account during this offer. CL accounts req. active smartphone line and is not limited to 1 free tablet.
Amazon's rules state that you must be at least 13 years of age to sign up for an account. However, you must be 18 to make a purchase (since you'll need to input this data into your account before a purchase), unless you can obtain enough money in gift card funds to pay for the purchase or receive a gift card-debit card that has a major card company attached that you can input to pay for the entire purchase price.
Prime Wardrobe lets you try on and purchase new styles with little hassle. Choose three or more items across the women's, men's, children's, and baby clothes, shoes, and accessories categories. Then, you'll have seven days to try them at home and decide what you want to keep. Check out online, then return your unwanted items for free using the resealable box and prepaid shipping label.
This new $24.99 product is exactly what the name suggests: it’s a plug that goes into an outlet and is compatible with Alexa. So you can tell Alexa to turn on or turn off whatever’s plugged into the Smart Plug from wherever you are. And it supports the automatic Wi-Fi setup mentioned above. Preorders kick off today, and the $24.99 Smart Plug will be available in October.

Our survey confirmed that Walmart was the most-shopped retailer for clothing and footwear over the past 12 months. Amazon is neck and neck with Target as America’s second-most-shopped retailer for clothing and footwear. That does not directly imply that Amazon is America’s second-biggest apparel retailer by sales, however, as shoppers’ average spend and frequency of purchase both factor into this metric.

The main body of this report discusses our survey findings, question by question. We have also provided an appendix that aggregates various third-party research firms’ estimates of Amazon’s US apparel sales in order to give readers a more complete picture. First, though, we bring together data points from various questions in our survey as we discuss six major themes that emerged from our research.
On September 25, 2007, Amazon Music, a online music store, was launched as Amazon MP3 in the US selling downloads exclusively in MP3 format without digital rights management.[46] (In addition to copyright law, Amazon's terms of use agreements restrict use of the MP3s, but Amazon does not use digital rights management (DRM) to enforce those terms.)[47] In addition to independent music labels, Amazon MP3 primarily sells music from the "Big 4" record labels: EMI, Universal, Warner Bros. Records, and Sony Music. Prior to the launch of this service, Amazon made an investment in Amie Street, a music store with a variable pricing model based on demand.[48] Amazon MP3 was the first online offering of DRM-free music from all four major record companies.[49][50][51][52]